Susie is a Cousin, Not a Role-Model

In contrast to Billy Black-Ops' ascetically solitary predicament, my litany of Billys who have actually registered on the Real Relationship Scale, i.e., have met the parents, is getting to be a problem.

Apparently.

(The following was related to me by a close-in-age cousin/partner-in-crime who was present for the conversation in question, presumably as a fly on the wall silently *dying* of the sinus-pressure from unreleased cackles of Schadenfreudeian glee):

***

I have a slew of cousins, ranging from a few years to a decade and a half younger than me, nearly all of them female (fuck yeah, Solo XX chromosomes!). And the Solo family, through 4 generations now, is a tight one, which practices full-on yearly reunions full of whiskey (our very own tiny silverback-ette, Grandma Solo, is generally the one calling for cocktails to begin at an early hour) and guitar singalongs and cookouts and day-hikes and drunken toasts and one-million-decibel card games and overwhelmingly matriarchal rule-via-snark-and/or-stern-looks (and, of course, your run-of-the-mill doses of sibling rivalry, couples-drama, general good-natured rumor-mongering, drama-queening, and forgive-and-forget-about-it-the-next-day-ing). Overall, it's a kickass family to belong to and has made me the lady SUSIE I am today.

(Being at the helm of the Solo family is a full-time job, amirite Grandma?)

Recently, Grandma Solo raised her Solo scepter of infallibility, with which she usually just beats Grandpa Solo into perpetual silence, and forged ahead with arrangements for this year's gathering at a posh campus-type locale in the woods, where we Solos could overrun an entire dormitory-style remote lodge and surrounding grounds, unfettered by outsiders or neighbors or police involvement.

Which was awesome.

The less-than-awesome angle of this orchestration was that Grandma Solo had also seen fit to parse out sleeping arrangements exactly as she personally desired, with zero input from any other attendees, and for one of my younger cousins (think over-18, under-25 - we'll call her "Sally"), these bunk assignments were glaringly absent any inclusion of her boyfriend of over a year. In fact, this guy had been to last year's Solo soiree (and survived!), but was somehow omitted from this year's roster.

Naturally, one of my aunts (we'll call her Jane) intervened on Sally's behalf. But Grandma Solo was resolute, shaking her head no, that really, Jane, no Billys need be brought along this time around. This time, we were going Full-Solo, no plus-ones. Which was ridiculous, as Jane's son - my one male cousin - had a new-ish girlfriend who was to be in attendance, and as in all past Solo Assemblies, significant others have been welcomed (because every gauntlet needs its runners).

Astutely, my aunt pointed out that - presumably using me as an example because, aside from my long-married sister, I am the eldest of my generation - "Susie's brought boyfriends for years, mom. There's no reason why Sally's boyfriend can't be there."

(Grandpa Solo in the sitting room, any given day.)

And before anyone saw it coming, Grandpa Solo, cowed as usual in his TV-watching corner of the room with his hearing aids turned off so that he wouldn't have to hear Grandma Solo kvetching at him or otherwise participate in pesky household conversations, suddenly chimed in:

"Oh come on, Jane! That's the point! I mean, you don't want Sally to turn into the next SUSIE!"

This is why we like our Solo men to fucking. Keep. Quiet.

(Next year, both my boyfriends will be in attendance, as pictured.)

Billy Bullfight Delivers

Sometimes, because we are evil and get bored and/or need good shared material with which to crack each other up and/or tear each other down, Punchin' Judy and I will get on the phone (she lives across the country nowadays), and both browse the same characters on an online-dating site. Usually this is done with a lot of (often self-deprecating) humor interjected - a typical transcript between us might read something like this:

Me: Your soul mate: [HellNo-type screen name such as "G_Thug881 or "MuchoMachoVida"].
Judy: Now those are some special prison tattoos.
Me: I don't know if you're the "kind of shourty (sic) who can Keep Up" though...
Judy: If his photos are any clue, I think by "Keep Up" (capitalization preserved) he is referring to attending quinceañeras and eating hot wings?
Me: Ah, well then I stand corrected, you're golden.

Etc.

(Dammit, "Abe_Dawg_1865," mirror selfies are an immediate no-go.)

Were it not for Judy accidentally punching in the wrong search zip-code during one such joint-browsing session, I honestly never would have even seen his profile, as he lived an hour away from me and, in Billy City, there's just no need to search too far and wide for Billys. But Judy clicked all over him and wanted to bed him by proxy, so insisted that I should write him. This is how I met Billy Bullfight.

Billy Bullfight was a little bit of a sleeper, which is interesting, because the fact of neighboring-town distance - even if only an hour's drive - immediately worked to push our dates to the overnighter level. In fact, the first time we went out for drinks, I ended up staying with him rather than driving the hour home late at night, and it was a great - though mostly-clothed - night and morning.

A week later, Billy Bullfight asked me up to stay with him in a friend's A-frame cabin in the mountains where he was dog-sitting, just outside the ski-slope town of Billyridge, where he had lived for years. And again, this time tucked up in an awesomely rustic ladder-loft bed, after having spent a couple dark on-deck hours wrapped in intertwined sleeping bags to keep the late-fall chill of the forest at bay while we shared a bottle of wine under a spectacular Orionid meteor shower, we slept together. But I mean like literally, we slept. Billy Bullfight liked to get about nine hours a night (fairly opposite my own insomniac tendencies), and the dude just wasn't in a hurry to get laid - which was half frustrating (because inquiring Judys wanted to know!), but also half charming.

(I'm good at this.)

For the first month or two, I wasn't entirely sold and was actively dating other people anyway. But Billy Bullfight was persistent and consistently easy to hang out with, and so he eventually won the dating wars. One day he asked me if we were "in a relationship," and I realized that this one had snuck in under the radar over the course of a slew of weekends of hikes and trail runs and co-cooked dinners and coffee under blankets in the mornings and climbing gym visits and snowboarding hooky-days and house-party makeouts and goofy slacklining-in-the-park afternoons and hot-tub-and-Netflix evenings, and had become, yes, a real relationship.

Billy Bullfight was a runner (oh, aren't they all?), but like no other runner I've ever known: not only was he a speedy mofo who turned in blistering mile-split times and placed in every 5- and 10K he entered, but also, he ran ultras: he'd drop into 50K mountain trail races on a whim and win;  he outran his own pacers for the last 20 miles of the Leadville 100, for fuck's sake. Coming from him, "Let's go for a run!" was a pretty formidable Sunday morning invitation: I once, about an hour's push-pace (for me) into his "short trail loop" with him, casually asked how many miles we were going to cover, to which he'd shrugged, completely not out of breath (in stark contrast to yours truly gasping along a few strides behind him), and nonchalantly sighed, "Umm, I think it's only like thirteen or fourteen or something?"

(I am only maintaining consciousness by watching your calves work, Billy Bullfight.)

He wasn't a particularly big dude, but he was all muscle - a fact I enjoyed every single ounce of. Just watching him unloading groceries, or stepping into pants in the morning, or reaching up to lather in the shower or whatever was like art. I mean, yes, sure, any man with a decent physique and something like 2% bodyfat is going to be neat to look at, especially when you spray soapy water on him. But what really turned my head and put me on the high-burner was the fact that he had a huge, ragged scar that knitted and forked and knotted all the way across his back.

From running.

Because, see, Billy Bullfight might be able to beat any mere human at any conceivable distance, but he couldn't claim the same with the four-legged crowd - a lesson he'd learned the jackass hard way, by getting himself gored pretty savagely in a Costa Rican running of the bulls. Dummy.

Punchin' Judy has long held the notion, which I've  adopted wholeheartedly, that for a man to be hot - not just run-of-the-mill good-looking, but hot - he has to have an "Owen Wilson Factor." That is, he needs something not at all typically-beautiful - like Owen's jacked-up nose - to set him apart from the merely-pretties, into the uniquely-sexy category. Billy Bullfight's scar was his Owen Wilson Factor, and I was insane over it. I loved the way his lats moving underneath it made it twist and pucker. I loved the way it felt, like little hard ridges and concave valleys under my exploring fingers when we were in bed. I fell asleep tracing it and woke up watching it move with his breathing and I thrilled to run my hands along it when we were chest-to-chest.

All this iron-manliness was juxtaposed against the somewhat effeminate fact that Billy Bullfight spent his days thinking about, talking about, baking, and basically eat-sleep-breathing cookies, because he was, by profession, a cookie shop owner (a fact I immediately snarked to Judy via live-text updates during our very first date, upon which news she dubbed him "The Cookie Baron" and texted me approximately 18 times the morning after to impatiently ask if The Cookie Baron and I had "made love on a pile of chocolate chips yet or what?"). 

(There's just no street-cred in cookies. None.)

He was gorgeous, yes - but in a kind of innocent and dumb-looking* way, with big astonished long-lashed Disney-eyes and a huge family-friendly grin at-the-ready for the whole world, and a passion for cookies that brought Dopey and the rest of the lovable dwarf crew's half-witted love for mining to mind. So much of a passion that, as a grown-ass man, he happily went by "Cookie-[real-world first name]," or sometimes just "Cookie," among his friends.

*(I'm not claiming Billy Bullfight was actually unintelligent. If he had been, he wouldn't have lasted more than two dates and possibly a bedroom test-drive on my roster but instead, I ended up falling for him pretty hard over nine or so months. So.

Also, about the whole cookie alter-ego: true, he did rather unfortunately refer to himself as a "dough-boy," and also true, like a 12-year-old fatgirl, he did use "Snickerdoodle" as his snicker-worthy password for everything. But on a slightly more respectable plane, he orchestrated every last one of all the business details, ran the shop's website, directed all kinds of advertising, kept tabs on finance, and managed a cast of part-time college-age girls. On top of that, being a slight perfectionist and control freak, he did all the packaging up and card-personalizing for internet mail-orders and call-ins himself, and - because he didn't want to have to insure said coeds on the road -  personally made all the local area deliveries. The latter MBA-oriented strengths were the ones I stressed to friends, in my honorable-girlfriend efforts to frame him as a Cookie Baron, not just a simpleton Cookie Boy.)

But I digress. Cut to the part where once I was fully starry-eyed, Billy Bullfight abruptly dumped me on my ass, which stung like a motherfucker because I never even saw it coming. I mean, usually (if you haven't already pulled over first yourself) you can feel the road getting narrower, maybe you're easing up a bit already on the accelerator and veering a little toward the shoulder so it's more of a glancing blow. Not this one. One day I was all-in and he had me meeting his extended family and  shit, and the next thing, head-on collision. There were no survivors.

(Oh by the way, I shut off your oven timer a while ago, Billy.)

So I was brokenhearted about stupid Billy Bullfight, in a Judy-better-bring-me-ice-cream-at-the-drop-of-a-hat way, except the problem there was aforementioned cross-country geography, and the fact that Judy - although she did put in a best-girlfriendly-worthy amount of phone time - would probably not have hesitated to hop in the sack with Billy Bullfight had she been in any sort of proximity, just because I couldn't anymore, whereas if she was on the scene, she probably could. Friends like these.

But Billy Boulangerie, who's seen me run aground through a couple low tides over the years, was on-point in getting me righted and back out to sea (possibly because, what with his dietary preferences, he could personally understand the pain of missing out on so, so many cookies). He called more to check in. He emailed funny things. He still mocked me and my crumbled cookie empire dreams, like any true friend worth keeping around, but in only the gentlest of ways, formulated to carve just enough distance between my mangled pride and Billy Bullfight to allow humor to weasel in and widen the gap. For instance, when I lamented the fact that, for obvious reasons, I could probably never again enjoy one specific cookie made in Billy Bullfight's shop, of which I'd grown crack-addict fond over the course of our courtship, Billy Boulangerie suggested that perhaps I could lurk in the alley behind the storefront and entice kids into taking money to buy me one. Y'know, much like alchies approach incoming liquor store patrons to purchase their 40-oz's after they've been 86'd. Not that I'd know anything about that.

(That's just from shampoo in my eyes and I'm thirsty so GET OFF MY BACK.)

One day, Billy Boulangerie texted to ask "what's your address again?"

I sent it off without a second thought.

The following morning, my doorbell rang. I didn't answer it, because I was very busy and also wearing the same clothes from two days prior. But a few hours later, when my midweek breakup-induced tailspin hangover ebbed enough for me to stop with the Youtube videos and lurch out of bed, I shuffled downstairs and found a neatly-packaged box on my steps.

Inside was a delivery-order dozen of those pined-for cookies, accompanied by a note that was, of course, penned in Billy Bullfight's own unmistakable handwriting:

"Sorry [Billy Bullfight's real-world name] was such a stupid fucking dud. 

       Love, [Billy Boulangerie's real-world name]."

Friends like these.

Billy Black-Ops: That Dog Won't Hunt

I heard from Billy Black-Ops the other day, breaking something like 10 months of silence between us.

Billy Black-Ops is someone I've known since my days of sharing the Billymore rowhouse with Tony - and an incommunicado stretch of this length isn't exactly unheard-of between us, over the last decade or so. He's deployed out-of-country for plainclothes-type military stuff almost as often as he's stateside, and for all of that time, his location is a mystery - so he submerges and resurfaces on my horizon fairly regularly.

Billy Black-Ops and I actually first crossed paths when I was a young, teenaged Private Solo marching around in really horribly-shined boots over the godforsaken red West Texas dustbowl. (True story -  a drill sergeant once made me drop and do about ten thousand pushups for suggesting, apparently at an unfortunate volume, that another soldier's boots appeared to have been  "polished with a turd," while the bad-boots-having offender was allowed to continue on his merry shit-shined way. The lesson I learned from this was that while snark is not rewarded in the world, neither is investing precious time in spit-shined toecaps or most other inane kiss-ass overachievements a valuable life-skill. And between the two, one of these things makes awesome people laugh, while the other sort of universally induces hatred. Life-goals trajectory permanently altered right there.)

(You think I'm fucking around right meow?)

I don't actually know how Billy Black-Ops knew who I was at that time, but one evening shortly after he arrived on-station, he knocked on my barracks door and asked where I would suggest to go hiking around the area.

OK, let me explain the place we were stationed:

No, fuck it. Let me just skip to the answer of the question, which is: No. Not here in Hell West Texas. Are you fucking kidding me? I think this was pretty much my response at the time, which left him a little stunned and awkward, standing on the second-floor walkway outside my door.

(Nothing grows you up fast like a stint in the good old United States Army!)

A few years later, Billy Black-Ops and I both found ourselves stationed outside of Billymore, and ended up hanging out a lot because he was one of Tony's better friends. In a little additional Vonnegut-ian random braiding-together of lives, it turns out that one of Billy Black-Ops' other best friends was a guy named Ryan from my hometown, Billyville, who I had actually been put into contact with by my recruiter to ask questions before I essentially signed my early twenties over to Uncle Sam.

So anyway, Billy Black-Ops and I have a long history, mostly made up of a handful of climbing road trips, a shit-ton of concerts and festivals (because Billy Black-Ops will pay out the nose for attendance-for-two on a cross-country saga to see the right headliner at Coachella or Bonnaroo or wherever), some camping-type adventures, a smattering of trail-running where I'm way too out of breath just trying to keep up with his ass to even crack jokes, a handful of people in common, and maybe one accidental drunken trip to the Billymore gay district involving hilarious fetish-shop accesory try-ons followed by a makeout (ahh ze gays, they're so enabling!), but overall, we're pretty platonic.

So usually when we catch up, conversations revolve around me trying to get him to leak some crucial information about where he's just been for the last six months, which he's infuriatingly good at dodging. This time was really no different, except that along the way it dawned on me that for all intents and purposes, Billy Black-Ops is living, basically, a part-time life (since he can't share the what/where/why of his absences with anyone, and he's gone six or so months out of every average year).

I realized this because Billy Black-Ops was openly pining for a dog.

But, being a semi-responsible non-shithead, he admitted there was no way he could program one into his current, constantly-here-and-gone life. And naturally, since my dog has been by far my steadiest and most unquestioningly-loving relationship for 14 years and counting and even that one I've probably come close to fucking up, I started to wonder: if he can't even maintain a dog, how does being gone so much affect Billy Black-Ops' dating arena? I mean, I'm here floundering around my own ridiculous "love" life full-time and then some, and it's still sometimes difficult to invest enough quality time with a Billy to keep his coat sleek and lustrous, so to speak (to use a thinly-veiled "dog" metaphor that is in no way a dig on the string of balding Billys I've somehow recently managed to date... except wait yeah, it kind of is).

(I'd have maybe spent more time on us if your pelt was fuller, Jean-Luc.)

Suddenly, while he was yapping on and on about a coonhound-mix or, come to think of it, maybe his latest international assignment which he'd finally decided to divulge or something, my brain became a goldfish, stuck swimming in tiny circles, fixated on the fact that in all the time I've known Billy Black-Ops - over a decade now - I have yet to meet one single girlfriend of his.

Not one.

Whatever he was yammering about at that point - clandestine air-assault operations on South American narcotics rings or funneling taxpayer slush-funds to southeast-Asian anti-Commie guerrillas or infiltrating former Soviet-bloc arms-dealing networks or somesuch, STOPTHECONVERSATION! STOPSTOPSTOPSHUTUP. I have unanswered private sex-life inquiries, Billy.

So, because I'm a terrible friend, I asked. And because he's a trusting guy, he answered. And, because I am an awful person, I'm blogging it:

Not only has Billy Black-Ops not really significantly dated anyone for nine years now, but he hasn't been laid at all in that time. 

Nine years. 

Not once.

(Ref: Sex Rulebook, p. 1,844; para. 4; Sec. 5.1.4: Virginity, Technical Regaining of)

I was floored. I might have dropped the phone. I think I blacked out there for a second. NINE YEARS?

Granted, it's not like when I'm single I'm out tomcatting (queencatting?) the town every night or anything. We all have spells where we play solitaire, I suppose (which is where having a dog to spoon comes in handy). But between relationships, I start to find my own Billyless eras comical-to-annoying maybe a few months in. Billy Black-Ops' streak? I can't even imagine. Not even hardcore Republican celibacy proponents go, y'know, without the hardcore for that long. He's almost a goddamned monk by now! How do you even go about getting back on the game-trail, at that point?

I'd like to say I handled this revelation delicately, but I believe I already mentioned that I'm a somewhat terrible friend. Billy Black-Ops explained a little (he's looking for the real deal, has not found it, and just doesn't want to do the disingenuous fling-scene thing EVEN AS A STOPGAP, WTF??), then clammed up, leaving me with no choice but to imagine (out loud to him over the phone) how terrible he's going to be at this when he finally gets hungry enough to hunt again. Seriously, people, you have to keep that skillset tuned up. Am I wrong?

(Insert your hunting/moneyshot metaphor here.)

I can't figure it out. The thing is, Billy Black-Ops is in his prime. He isn't a bad-looking guy. He's smart and well-read and pretty funny, once you get to know him. He has an 8-pack, for fuck's sake. How is he not sleeping with anyone, like, ever? All I can come up with is: gay, eunuch, Catholic issues like whoah!, or full of shit.

Considering guys with puppies and babies have no trouble meeting ladies at Any Park, USA, and considering Billy Black-Ops is nowhere near conjuring a baby any time soon, I think I might just get him a preemptive dog. Because otherwise I fear he's clearly on the path to owning a dozen cats. And besides, since he's gone so much, I'm sure his dog would have awful manners and run off after any and everything it wanted to with wild abandon... so maybe it could remind him how much fun the chase can be.

Riding With Billy Bondo

Because I'm normal and normal things are always happening to me with normal frequency, I got another Facebook message from Billy Bondo. Think of it like hitchhiking: you probably survey the vehicle/subject-line for only a second or two before you have to decide whether to get in.

I clicked.

When we last left young Billy Bondo, he was dreaming of face-licking and I was all like:

(I just got my hair done.)

But, because you can't actually see someone's facial expressions (much less try to get your tongue on them) when they open your email, Billy Bondo apparently kept me in his dossier of taste-test possibilities and tossed out one more email even after his last offer was met with silence, which started like so:

Hey Susie! Brace yourself, things are about to get mildly strange for just a bit!

 So, apparently things get "mildly strange" for people at different points on the journey, because here I thought all this talk of face-licking was right about where we started swerving over the center line in bat-country. I buckled up and read on:

How do you feel about mushrooms? Wanna go eat some in the desert with me? 

Now I'm not against drugs. In fact, I'm rather fond of some of them and partake on the regular.

 (Oh hey, Mom... haha! Drugs! You know, like caffeine? Mmm, coffee. And a nice glass of chardonnay with my pedicure? Don't mind if I do!) 

But I can't say I've ever had "take psychedelic substance of unknown source with face-licking stranger in alien environment far from home" on my adult to-do list. But hold on, we're heading toward the horizon at full-tilt with the top down here, and it keeps getting better:

We're all on our own journey and a little absurdity creeps into everyone's life and behavior and that gets under our skins and takes strange shapes... I imagine peeling beautiful people I see on the street apart layer by layer. I just would like to see you without your skin to know whats underneath.

Ooohhhhhkay.

I know you could, of course, take "skin" as a somewhat interesting - if maybe slightly ham-handed - metaphor for the walls people build between themselves and the rest of the living, breathing, painfully-beautiful spectrum of human connections, through a lifetime of for-better-or-worse experiences. Or some such horseshit. And for the record, I do think that's the angle Billy Bondo was attempting to come at it from. But just in case there are any Billys out there thinking of using this same idea as a first-date pickup, I'd like to suggest that the most effective imagery to conjure in your prospective Susie's mind might not be that guy in Florida who ate a homeless dude's face off next to the freeway, or, say...

Buffalo Bill.

(Are all the Billys these days just too young for this movie? Anyone? Bueller? Oh, is that another movie I'm the only one on the singles-scene old enough to remember?)

This.

This right here is the sort of thing that makes your skin a little tougher, adds another road-rash layer between you and the next stranger, the next potential Billy, the next ride taking you ever-closer to the great Pacific: when you have to bail out shoulder-first over the top of the passenger-side door while the car is still moving, rolling gracelessly to a stop along the dusty, deserted side of the heat-cracked two-lane blacktop while the taillights of another questionable Billy regain speed and recede into the low desert light, sun already cooling behind the fire-dry mountains.

(You're going to want some lotion for that.)

Billy Breakdown Needs Counseling

In case you needed any more reason not to date online, here's the Billy Breakdown Story:

I found Billy Breakdown online, and his profile screen-tested wonderfully: good-looking, avid marathoner, back in school for his second Master's (to become a counselor, after years of teaching), progressive, hints of witticism - seemed, well... together, life-wise.  So I fired off a message and sat back to wait.

And wait.

Aaaand wait.

(I require faster-than-pneumonia response.)

See, here's something about online dating: it's really, really superficial. As such, though I know my profile itself won't be everyone's cup of tea (a lot of dudes see correct grammar and syntax as red-flags, apparently), I generally expect right around a 100% email response-rate, because:

a) I actually initiate contact with very, very few men online, and

b) I suspect most sites are pretty demographically male-heavy and so supply-and-demand factors into the equation in my favor, and

c) Pictures. Let's face it - we all just look at the pictures first. There, I said it. Hate if you want.

So, after around 72 hours of lag-time (which I spent alternately bitching to girlfriends about the insult/speculating with them whether Billy Breakdown had just probably died in the interim or something), I finally got a response and we set up a date, where it came out within the first ten minutes that Billy Breakdown's lack of communication was due to maybe the only other acceptable excuse, beyond aforementioned death: the fact that he was in jail when I wrote him. 

(Well, for one, you piss off impatient Susies.)

Yes, jail. I won't go into the legal transgressions that landed him there, but it was a short little wrist-slap stint and he seemed genuinely contrite and I once chased after a twice-felon, so this really wasn't a big roadblock.

Billy Breakdown and I went out a few more times, and I finally invited him over to hang out at my place, where he could run the social gauntlet that is my current housemate, The Mover. I'll call him The Mover because he's a long-time friend (his origin story: he's Billy Builder's male BFF I met at a wedding Billy Builder and I attended) who's helped me move households and carried me home from bars more times than I care to count, over the years. I'm also going with The Mover because he's a great tool for weeding-out and moving-along Billys who just can't keep up with his humor. He's sharp but hilarious, delightfully evil but never mean-spirited, and will absolutely wit-bludgeon the poor soul who can't toss the ball back to him quickly enough. In short, as he's pretty much my brother (therefore disqualified from Billydom), he's just a perfect platonic match for me.

Unfortunately, The Mover was out that evening. So unencumbered, we had a few beers, played guitar and sang shitty songs for each other, laughed a lot, and eventually moved on to a light couch makeout. I should stress "light," because it completely took me by surprise when Billy Breakdown suddenly stopped the action, got a little sheepish, and demurred with a statement to the effect of "I'm sorry, I'm just so bad at this the first time around."

 (Um, bad at what? We're not doing goddamn trigonometry here.)

I realized that Billy Breakdown must have assumed I'd invited him over with a plan for sex. Now, I'm a pretty liberated gal, and I do put off the vibe of a down-ass girl from time to time (though when I do it's completely intentional, not of the accidental-crossed-signals variety), but this was truly a surprise to me. I quickly made the situation even more awkward by spouting off a reassuring "Oh, nonononoNO, Billy, we're not fucking tonight," and there the pins landed. Or, for a more representative metaphor, there the ball hit the gutter and the entire bowling alley lost power and was plunged into darkness.

But, undaunted, Billy Breakdown popped up on my phone within a day to arrange another date, which went well enough that I again deigned him worthy of an encounter with The Mover. So off to my place we went.

This time around, The Mover was home, two whiskeys in, and in splendid form. I took a deep breath, mentally wished Billy Breakdown well, and turned him out into the gladiator arena kitchen. And he did fine! He kept his head above water! He actually gave The Mover a run for his money! He freaking made friends with The Mover! He was in!

Of course, over the course of his trial-by-fire, we both had a few drinks, and when the witching hour approached (I work very, very early mornings in the summer), Billy Breakdown was a little too tipsy to drive home.

Fine. No problem. He's in, remember?

So I show Billy Breakdown to the couch and go upstairs, fully intending to be asleep within the quarter-hour, because Short-Of-Sleep Susie is a complete trainwreck, and he's already done the weird-about-physical-contact thing before so whatever, he can couch it until he's ready to drive, but I cannot stay up to entertain because grownuplife.

I go into my bathroom to brush my teeth.

I wash my face.

I do some other brief bathroom-mirror grooming.

I come out of my bathroom to find Billy Breakdown in my bed. Surprise, surprise.

 ("Surely, sir, you don't think you're the first guy on Earth to try to pull this - the cleverest of all moves?")

OK, pause. In all adult honesty, I'm not entirely opposed to him being there - I mean, in my bed at a time I am also about to be in my bed. The issue, right now, is that precious minutes of sleep are slipping through my clutches, and any sort of billyfoolery is surely going to take up far more of said minutes than I'm willing to part with tonight.

OK, play. I decide that fuck it, I'll just get in bed and we'll go to sleep and that's that. So I lie down, and turn off the light, and Billy Breakdown wants to kiss a little so I go in for like two lukewarm wife-has-a-headache-caliber kisses and then suddenly we are in another dimension. And this dimension involves Billy Breakdown leaping out of the bed onto the floor, and curling up, and crying. Cry-ing!

I don't have a problem with men and emotions, but seriously, what the FUCK. Lights-on, I see that Billy Breakdown, in the fetal position on my carpet, is really truly having a breakdown. Things that I now know are part of a breakdown include (but are possibly not limited to):

- Inconsolable tears
- Incoherent sob-words
- Covering of head with arms like they taught schoolkids to do for 1950's nuclear strike drills
- Rocking to and fro
- Cryface (mostly rubbing all over carpet, which Jee-zuhs, just... you know I have a dog, right, Billy?)
- Me, not able to go to sleep as planned because what the fucking fuck is happening here??

I mean, this is A New One of epic proportions. Has he been psychologically damaged by his humor death-match with The Mover? Has he suddenly been overcome with Catholic guilt over being in my bed, which is his own damn fault? Does he have some sort of real, honest-to-god repressed sexual issue he's reliving? Wait a minute. Waitwaitwait. What the fuck happened to Billy Breakdown in prison? (Or maybe, does he just lose his shit when he's too short on sleep, like I am about to fucking do right now/tomorrow?)

This the most incredible emotional implosion I've ever witnessed, and between the two of us, I'm not the one trained to deal with this sort of shit! (Remember, this guy is almost certified to be a counselor!) Honestly, it's like I'm not even interacting with an adult human being right now - he cannot communicate, he cannot move, he cannot do anything but, well... whatever he's doing on my carpet. And as such, I can't go to sleep, which starts to piss me off after about ten minutes. Finally, as he simply can't be allowed to continue to melt down all over my floor because there's no way I'll drift off peacefully with all that noise, I present him with an ultimatum:

"Billy, OK, you know what? You can either stop it and get in bed and go to sleep, or you have to leave."

(A dame's gotta get her sleep, ya hear now?)

***

I heard from Billy Breakdown once after The Incident, in the form of a text-bomb (so long it arrived broken into four separate texts) claiming that he didn't *really* remember the night, but was horribly embarrassed and blah blah blah apology hey do you wanna go out again? I didn't even know how to respond, so I never did. I just can't even.

A couple weeks later, reminiscing on the Billy Breakdown story and the general glory of my dating life with The Mover, I suddenly realized it was probably time to clear him off my Facebook. We logged on and looked for him, but turns out he had already not only unfriended me, but blocked me.

I can't help thinking that my being in the "blocked" category can likely be extrapolated to mean I've joined the ranks of whatever repressed memories of his will come spilling out of his tear-ducts again some unpredictable late night far in the future.

But it'll be onto some other unfortunate Susie's carpet. 

And for everyone's sake, I sure hope she's down for an all-nighter.